Six good reasons to try Manjaro Linux 0.8.5

Monday may have brought the disappointing news that Fuduntu Linux will soon close its doors, but another young, up-and-coming Linux distribution appears to be continuing along its upward path without interruption.

Manjaro Linux, a distro I first covered only a few months ago, just released a fresh update, and it's particularly notable for the addition of a graphical installer and other beginner-friendly features.

By February, Manjaro had already reached the No. 15 spot in DistroWatch's page-hit rankings. Today, it's up even further, at No. 10. Here's a rundown of what you'll find in this promising new release.

1. A graphical installer

Certainly most notable among many new changes in Manjaro 0.8.5 is its new graphical installer, which promises to make installation much easier, particularly for newcomers to Linux.

The installer was actually forked from Linux Mint but includes tweaks to reflect the fact that Manjaro is based on Arch Linux rather than Ubuntu and Debian.

“For now, only installation on one hard drive is properly supported, but you can mount other partitions by hand if you choose the manual option,” explained project coleader Philip Müller in a blog post over the weekend.

The project recommends using its command-line installers for that purpose. Those installers also make it possible to install Manjaro on Macs, Müller noted.

ManjaroA new graphical installer promises to make installation easier, especially for beginners.

2. A new Settings Manager

Also promising to make life easier for newcomers to the distro is Manjaro's new graphical Settings Manager tool, which comes with wizards to guide users through the installation of language localization packages as well as handling system language, keyboard layouts, and user management. A new keyboard-focused tool, meanwhile, is meant to make keyboard layout setup as simple as possible.

ManjaroThe new Manjaro Settings Manager includes wizards to guide users through numerous tasks.

3. Three desktop flavors

Manjaro 0.8.5 comes with Xfce and OpenBox as its standard desktop environments, but users can also install their own preferred alternative using the distro's Net-Edition, which includes just the basic packages and the X.org-stack. That way, more advanced users can build their system to suite their tastes exactly.

4. A guide for beginners

Adding a further note of welcome to beginning users, Manjaro 0.8.5 offers a 61-page, step-by-step guide (PDF) to installing and using the distro, including both graphical and command-line installation methods.

5. A graphical package manager

Pamac, Manjaro's default graphical package manager, got updated with this new release to include interactive searches by name, download-size information, improved sortability, and the ability to resize all panels. Numerous language translations were also added, and several bugs were fixed.

6. A raft of updates

Last but not least, Manjaro 0.8.5 includes a variety of updates to its components, including version 3.8.5 of the Linux kernel, systemd 198, and X.org 1.14.0. Also added are proprietary driver support for AMD and Nvidia graphics cards and extra multimedia support.

Ready to take Manjaro Linux 0.8.5 for a free test drive? It's available as a free download in 32- and 64-bit editions.

Katherine Noyes U.S. Correspondent

Katherine Noyes has been an ardent geek ever since she first conquered Pyramid of Doom on an ancient TRS-80. Today she covers enterprise software in all its forms, with an emphasis on Linux and open source software.More by Katherine Noyes